A Mixed Marriage's 25th Anniversary of Legality

By DAVID MARGOLICK,

Published: June 12, 1992

CENTRAL POINT, Va.—
Mildred Jeter Loving is now a widow, the marriage that made her famous having ended in tragedy. But she remains the same intensely private woman she was a quarter-century ago, when her name entered the lawbooks, and she is as reluctant to acknowledge her contribution to the civil rights movement as she once was to participate in it.

In the wee hours of one morning in July 1958, the quiet life that Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, enjoyed in this remote hamlet was shattered when three law officers opened the unlocked door of their home, walked into their bedroom and shined a flashlight on the couple. What they saw confirmed what they had been told: Mrs. Loving was black and Mr. Loving white, making their marriage illegal in Virginia.

"What are you doing in bed with this lady?" Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks of Caroline County asked Mr. Loving, who was 24 years old at the time. Mr. Loving pointed to the wall where the couple had hung their marriage certificate, from the District of Columbia. "That's no good here," Sheriff Brooks replied. He charged the couple with unlawful cohabitation, carted them into nearby Bowling Green and threw them into the county jail. Freedom to Live Elsewhere

The county circuit judge, Leon M. Bazile, sentenced the Lovings to a year in prison, telling them, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages." But the judge offered the Lovings a deal: they could go free as long as they promised to steer clear of Virginia, at least as man and wife, for the next 25 years.

After several years of unhappy exile in Washington, the Lovings challenged Virginia's 1924 anti-miscegenation statute. And 25 years ago today, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that laws barring racial intermarriage in Virginia and 15 other states were unconstitutional.

To civil libertarians, the decision eliminated one of the last legal vestiges of slavery. "The Loving case represents a judicial recognition of the sanctity of marriage and the ability of people irrespective of race to enjoy the protections of the Constitution in their choice of mates," said Philip T. Nash, a Fairfax, Va., legal historian who has written on the case.

But for Mrs. Loving, whose husband was killed in an automobile accident in 1975, blazing legal trails was an experience she would gladly have forgone. The ordeal -- which included five days in jail and banishment to a place where she could no longer walk down a country lane to pick up her mail -- is one she revisits only reluctantly.

"It was thrown in my lap," she said about the case. "What choice did I have?"

Eleven miles and several decades removed from Interstate 95, Central Point is little more than a scattering of simple homes, a boarded-up general store and St. Steven's Baptist Church, which recently gave Mrs. Loving its "human rights award." Million Interracial Couples

The High Court's decision, which Mrs. Loving said she never read, allowed her, her husband and their three young children, who were considered illegitimate under the law, to live in Virginia in peace and to begin building the simple white cinderblock house in which Mrs. Loving still lives, a mile and a half from where the sheriff and his deputies rousted them.

There are now a million interracial couples in the United States, including several in and around Central Point. Moreover, the newest member of the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, is a black man married to a white woman.

But some people of interracial backgrounds and mixed marriages say they do not find his presence on the High Court assuring, given his own conservative politics. They say they expect him to join in a Supreme Court decision that will eviscerate abortion rights established in Roe v. Wade and that could weaken other decisions concerning marital privacy.

"I'm not so certain as I would have been a few years ago that this is a settled issue," said Carlos A. Fernandez, a lawyer in Berkeley, Calif., who is president of the Association for Multi-Ethnic Americans.

That group, along with the Interracial Family Circle of Washington, Virginia and Maryland, will salute Mrs. Loving on Saturday at a conference in Chevy Chase, Md. Mrs. Loving plans to attend, her rheumatoid arthritis permitting. While in the area she may also make her first visit to the Supreme Court.

But while laws can be changed by judicial fiat or the stroke of a pen, attitudes cannot, particularly racial attitudes among some people in an area where storied names from the Confederate past -- A. P. Hill and Stonewall Jackson, Spottsylvania Court House and Chancellorsville -- pop up alongside Golden Arches and Texaco stars.

In the 34 years since the raid, Mr. Brooks and Mrs. Loving have not exchanged a single word. Mrs. Loving said she sees him occasionally, including once last week while he was cutting his grass, but steers clear of him. Mr. Brooks said he would not know Mrs. Loving if he saw her. But he made clear he had no qualms about his actions.